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Aymara Indians’ rage explodes

By Raúl Pierri

Montevideo, Peru, Apr. 30 (IPS)— Local residents of an Andean highland village in Peru were holding the members of their town council Apr. 30 Friday, threatening to kill them, just a few days after the mayor of a nearby town was publicly lynched.

But the Apr. 26 murder of the mayor of the town of Ilave by local residents who are mainly Aymara Indians can be interpreted as an outburst by a poor, marginalized community demanding a voice in local decision-making and fed up with being governed by corrupt local elites, said indigenous leaders and analysts.

It can also be read as an expression of traditional Aymara justice.

In Ilave, a town of 90,000 near Lake Titicaca, some 560 miles southeast of Lima, the capital, Mayor Cirilo Robles was pulled out of a town council meeting, dragged several blocks, and beaten to death in the town square by an enraged mob on Apr. 26, the 25th day of a strike demanding that he resign.

The local Aymara residents accused Robles and his administration of embezzlement and misappropriation of funds.

On Apr. 29, the people of Tilali, a village of 5,000 near the Bolivian border on the north shore of Lake Titicaca, took four town councilors hostage after the mayor, Melesio Larisco Quispe, who is also accused of corruption, fled.

On Apr. 30, a high-level government commission in Peru was negotiating with the Aymara leaders in Ilave, trying to get the situation under control.

Nearly half of Peru’s 26 million people are Quechua or Aymara Indians.

The country’s newspapers reported the news of Robles’ murder with headlines like “Barbarity” to describe the explosion of a long-contained rage that had become visible in Ilave.

Indignant lawmakers decided to call Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi for formal questioning, accusing him of failing to intervene earlier in Ilave to prevent the violence.

But in the midst of the loud condemnation of what had occurred, some Aymara Indians justified the murder and predicted further violence if the government of President Alejandro Toledo continues to ignore the community’s grievances and demands.

A public lynching “is a common, ordinary event,” Bolivian Aymara leader and legislator Felipe Quispe told IPS. “We at any moment kill thieves, wrongdoers, and traitors. The laws of our country are no good; we do not use them.”

The lawmaker urged his “brothers and sisters in Peru” to keep on fighting the “qaras” (whites) in order to “stop being enchained,’’ and warned that there will be lynchings “everywhere.”

“We only have to be patient. They will see,” Quispe, the founder of Bolivia’s Pachakuti Indigenous Movement, told IPS.

“The taking of hostages in Tilali seems to indicate that the crisis in Ilave is expanding” in southern Peru, where the country’s Aymara Indians live, said journalist Feliciano Gutiérrez, a correspondent with the Peruvian daily La República in the southern city of Puno.

“The situation in Ilave is improving, but not in the rest of the region,” he said. “Some highways leading to Bolivia are still blocked, while indigenous people in Tilali have threatened to carry out more lynchings if the government does not send a high-level commission there as well.”

Gutiérrez explained that for years, the Aymaras have felt ignored and neglected by Peru’s governments and abandoned to the whims of corrupt local authorities.

Quispe said the Aymara Indians in Ilave “are happy” because they will have their own government, and because they took one more step towards rebuilding the Collasuyo, one of the four regions of the ancient Inca empire of Tahuantinsuyo, which covered the modern-day territories of Bolivia and Peru, and parts of Argentina, Ecuador, and Chile.

The Inca empire emerged in the 13th century and extended its influence over a number of indigenous groups, including the Aymaras. It was defeated in the 15th century by the invasion of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Since then, indigenous people in the region have been marginalized, discriminated against, and mistreated.

The Aymaras currently number nearly two million, 80 percent of whom live in Bolivia, nearly 15 percent in Peru, and the rest in Chile. The overwhelming majority are poor campesinos or peasant farmers.

The Aymara community “has its own laws, its own culture, its own way of being, which is why it does not accept the ‘white people’s’ government,” said Quispe, who pledged “solidarity” with their “brothers and sisters” in Peru from Bolivia’s Aymara Indians.

Quispe was a member of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army in Bolivia, for which he served time in prison from 1992 to 1997. In October 2003, he was one of the leaders of the popular uprizing against the natural gas export plans of the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was forced to resign and flee the country on account of the nationwide protests.

Bolivia’s indigenous majority has gained political influence in recent years.

Bienvenido Sacu, the president of the Coordinator of Ethnic Peoples of the eastern department of Santa Cruz, said a series of protests were planned against the government of Carlos Mesa, who replaced Sánchez de Lozada, and who is accused of failing to address their social grievances.

In October, at least 70 people were killed when the security forces cracked down on the protests that toppled the government.

The reaction by the Aymaras in Ilave “should not surprise anyone,” said Bolivian Aymara historian, sociologist, and activist Waskar Ari Chachaki.

“The Aymara have a long tradition of collective government. For them democracy must be direct. It is not enough for them to go and vote every four or five years. They demand constant participation in decision-making,” he said.

“They are very poor, and they react with rage to local governments that enrich themselves through corruption. That is why these violent incidents occur,” he added.

But Chachaki, the author of several books on Andean indigenous peoples and the creator of the indigenous Kechuaymara Foundation, said the ethnic group is pursuing different objectives in Bolivia and Peru.

In Peru, where the Aymara are a relatively small group, the aim is to participate in local governments from which they have historically been excluded.

In Bolivia, the Aymara have more ambitious goals. Several Aymara Indians have made it to the legislature and to posts in municipal governments. Their aim is to make it to the central government one day.

But the majority in both countries are opposed to their governments, and dream of the creation of a great Aymara republic, which would be governed by its own laws, language, and culture.

“In the rest of Latin America, it might seem unusual for Peru’s Aymara Indians to want to separate from Lima and join Bolivia. But for us it is normal,” said Chachaki.

He noted that the history of the Aymara community in Peru has been marked by many uprizings, but that in the past few years the movement has grown in strength.

The indigenous question is present in many countries of Latin America. This month it was catapulted into the headlines in Brazil when members of the Cinta Larga (wide belt) indigenous community in the Amazon jungle in northern Brazil killed 29 garimpeiros, or informal miners, who were illegally extracting diamonds in their territory.

With respect to the murder of Robles, Chachaki underlined that it should be analyzed within the context of a social conflict.

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Economic Summit sparks protests in Warsaw

Compiled by Liz Allen

May 5 (AGR)— Thousands of anti-globalisation demonstrators marched through central Warsaw on Apr. 29 as the Polish city hosted an economic summit marking the reunification of Europe.

The World Economic Forum held a European Economic Summit in Warsaw between Apr. 28 and 30, focusing on EU enlargement. It hosted around 1,200 official visitors, including 15 heads of state and over 700 representatives of the international business community. They gathered to discuss issues of EU integration as Poland and nine other states entered the European Union on May 1.

The European Economic Summit is organized by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum, which anti-corportate globalization groups view as an exclusive club representing the rich.

Protesters regularly target the forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, but are kept far away by police.

Flanked by police in riot gear, some 3,000 leftists, accompanied by radical trade unionists and a group of laid-off miners — forced to dig coal out of illegal makeshift pits to feed their families — walked down one of Warsaw’s main streets, chanting anti-globalization, anti-capitalist and anti-war slogans.

Rolling slowly among the marchers was a float draped in a blood-red banner with white lettering proclaiming: “The world is for the people, not for [US President George W.] Bush.”

Protesters carried placards and banners reading “People are more important than profits.”

Banners read “Capitalism Kills, Let’s Kill Capitalism,” “Shut Down the Summit of Unemployment, War and Corruption,” “Away with Global US Terror,” and “No Blood For Oil.”

Many protested the US-led war and occupation in Iraq, which the Polish government has supported by sending troops.

The crowd crawled along major Warsaw thoroughfares flanked by shops, cafes and other businesses boarded up in anticipation of the kind of rioting that had erupted at other Economic Forum sites including Seattle, Genoa and Prague.

The heavy police presence, which included water cannons tucked away in side streets and a helicopter clattering overhead, was dismissed by many protesters as a typical example of politicians and the media inciting public hysteria.

No arrests were reported.

“They have been building up the tension for weeks and inciting public panic, but the only reason is to score political points,” said a 30-year-old lawyer from the “Legal Team,” a police-brutality monitoring group.

“And the media have to have something to show on television and write about. It’s all about profits,” he added.

One policeman surveying the crowd, however, expressed relief that rumours predicting a massive influx of football hooligans had so far proved unfounded.

Sources: Associated Press, Budapest Business Journal, Reuters

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In Italy, small is deadly

By Stefania Milan

Rome, Italy, Apr. 30 (IPS)— ‘Made in Italy’ is a tag that suggests stylish cars, fancy clothes and olive oil. But while some of these industries are in decline, the Italian weapons industry is registering record success; and poor countries are among its biggest clients.

Italian factories sold military hardware worth $757 million last year, 30 percent more than in 2002, according to official information. The weapons included aircraft, armored vehicles, radar equipment, torpedoes and light arms such as pistols and light machine guns.

The sector has grown 94 percent in the past ten years, according to the Chamber of Commerce based in Milan.

Individual buyers included Malaysia which bought weapons worth $108 million, the United States ($73.5 million), Syria ($66 million), France ($53 million), Egypt ($49.8 million), India ($28 million), Saudi Arabia ($9.5 million) and Israel ($1.8 million).

Countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East bought $240 million worth of Italian weapons. Sub-Saharan Africa, where nine million dollars can fight HIV/AIDS, bought weapons worth $13.2 million. There are 15 armed conflicts currently taking place in Africa.

Small arms have been used extensively in the conflicts in Africa. They are responsible for 90 percent of war casualties around the world, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Italy is the third largest producer of small arms and light weapons after the United States and Britain, according to Amnesty International.

“Small arms and light weapons are primary tools of violence in the world, and peace hinges on limiting such tools,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had said at a meeting of the UN Security Council in September 1999. “The United Nations is committed to limiting the international flow of small arms.”

But more than four years later that declaration did not spoil the party at the International Sporting Arms and Outdoor show in Brescia in the north of Italy Apr. 17-20.

Launched in 1980, this is one of the three biggest small arms and light weapons exhibitions, besides the Shot Show in Las Vegas and the IWA (Internationale Waffen Ausstellung, International Weapons Exhibition) in Nuremberg.

About 34,000 people visited the event. The Italian show draws the biggest number of visitors; it even lets in children, while the events in Las Vegas and Nuremberg do not.

About 90 percent of Italian weapons are manufactured in Brescia. As many as 137 factories produce mainly small arms. These include the famous Beretta guns.

To coincide with the event, civil society groups in Rome were asking for an arms embargo on Africa at a three-day event ‘Italiafrica 2004.’

“Africa’s destiny depends on us too,” was the slogan of the event organized by the municipality of Rome together with Italiafrica, a loose coalition of civil society groups. More than 100,000 people took part in a demonstration at the conclusion of the event.

“In Congo, four million people died mainly through small weapons,” missionary Alex Zanotelli told the conference. “The risk is that Africa will become important for Italy only because it is a large market for its weapons.”

The main sponsor of the Rome event was Banca Intesa, the biggest Italian banking group created in 1998 after the merger of three national banks. Banca Intesa is the second biggest backer of the Italian weapons sector, with 29 percent of the cake. The first is the Bank of Rome.

Last year the bank funded weapons sales to India, Pakistan, Israel and Kosovo, activists say.

Activists campaigning against the spread of small arms have been asking these banks to help reduce trading in weapons. But the flow of arms from Italy is less transparent now than in the past, says ControllARMI, an Italian network for disarmament.

Until 2003 every item exported needed specific authorization, according to a law on transparency in weapons trade passed in 1990. That law was considered the most advanced in Europe. But Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government passed a new law that allows the identity of the final buyer to be concealed.

An EU directive says weapons cannot be sold to governments responsible for “severe” violation of human rights. But the EU rules passed in 1998 set only basic requisites and are not binding, ControllARMI says.